


Hey Judy Hey

by Avalon1632



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Tyranny (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 22:36:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19895467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avalon1632/pseuds/Avalon1632
Summary: With her Archons and her legions, Kyros' rule spread across the lands, into the seas, and throughout the skies, and when Terratus was hers, they began to spread to the stars. Rescuing a Turian Patrol gives the Empire a friendly entry onto the Galactic Stage, but how will the rest of the Council react to magic-wielding humanity and its eternal dictator? Inspired by Tyranny.





	Hey Judy Hey

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter I: We Be The Cavalry  
> AN:  
> Hey there, Fan-fic-folks!
> 
> So, yes. I'm starting yet more new stories. Unfortunately, trying to write the old stuff is more difficult that I thought it'd be. I can't quite seem to get the voice of the characters back like I used to. Not sure if I'm being perfectionist, diffident, or mildly delusional, but I'll keep working on them and hope for the best. 
> 
> Anyway. Onto this story. This one is based on a game called Tyranny where you play a minion of the bad guy after the bad guy had won. You act as a 'Fatebinder' - kind of the in-universe version of Judge Dredd - sent out to the Overlord's newest acquisition 'The Tiers' to mediate a dispute between her chief lieutenants in the area and levy a measure of her displeasure in them by way of a powerful piece of magic called an 'Edict' that threatens to kill everyone in the area if they don't get their acts together. As a game, it's decent enough, though it does clunk in places. The story is occasionally dispeptic and often contradictory in theme (you play a bad guy in a bad world, but it's hella desperate to let you be a good guy too, though it sometimes can't decide between rewarding and punishing you for being such) and the combat is alternately smooth as hell and bizarrely dull. The midgame pacing of the story feels awful during, but resolves itself a lot better when you finally reach the end. It's a very human game - holding two entirely contradictory facets of itself at the same time while entertaining an even more divergent third quality - but I would definitely recommend it regardless of its myriad issues. 
> 
> The origin for the idea to combine Tyranny with Mass Effect is a surprisingly simple one - both 'worlds' derive their technology from the work of those who went before. In Tyranny, magic is 'created' by Archons - powerful magical peeps that represent a particular concept, but we'll get into that later on in the story - and that magic is accessed by others through imitation using symbols representing that Archon. In Mass Effect, while some small ingenuities and acts of creation occur, the vast majority of technology is apparently unchanging and consistent for most everyone due to them all basing their technology on the same cosmic equaliser of the 'Mass Effect'. A lot of these 'Badass Alternate Humanity' fics have Humanity being massively philosophically different to the Citadel regarding scientific advancement and experimentation, so I wondered what it would be like if they were on an equal footing in terms of development and empirical mentality.
> 
> Oh, yes. That reminds me. For the record, though this might seem a tad HFY at times, this is gonna take more of an overall... 'Humanity, Fucking What?' kind of tone. In the bizarreness sense, not the 'Shepard catches sight of a non-human with a nice ass and invites them back to their cabin' sense. Humanity won't stomp the Citadel, because conflict without, y'know, conflict is boring as all hell, but they will certainly be a baffling kick up the backside to the stagnating Council races. What's more fun than fucking up the status quo for an entire galaxy, right? 😄
> 
> Underlined things in the story are part of the 'Codex' and have entries at the end. I'll only really do stuff that isn't in the canon Codex, but if it's important I'll add in an entry. 
> 
> Thanks for reading and, as always, please review.

The Turian vessels left FTL at full alert, as the Doctrines instructed when performing patrols at the marches of their territory. 

Captain Suvir sighed, rubbing absently with one claw against his aching temple. The alert lights were intended to take advantage of a peculiar quirk in the Turian biology where certain wavelengths of radiation had an almost stimulating effect. Unfortunately, too much time under those lights lead to migraines and their rapid transit from system to system meant Suvir had one hell of a headache. 

A minute passed as the bridge crew section heads sounded off various and vital status reports about their various and vital specialisms that all added up to the same invariant and useless thing they'd found this entire trip. Nothing. 

Or not. 

"Captain? Three contacts ahead, as of an hour and forty-one minutes l." 

Suvir perked up. There wasn't supposed to be anyone out here. The marches were essentially a demilitarised zone surrounding Turian territory, acting like the old Sacral Lines of the homeworld cities, purposed for troop movement and buffering against outside forces. The military value was debatable, and hotly debated at that, but the tradition was one even new-minded officers appreciated the significance of.

"Identify them. What's their bearing?"

The Information Officer - Lieutenant Rejjiktus - frowned at his station's readouts before reporting in an almost baffled tone. "They're... Quarians, sir? Mismatched ships, all roughly correspond to Council Frigate-class vessels, but they are broadcasting Quarian comm codes. They're at fifteen degrees down and twenty starward." 

Starward? Suvir hadn't expected Cuner sentiments from Rejjiktus of all people. Though it was more common in the youth, he supposed. What other traditions were the Academy letting fall by the wayside these days? They'd used Starboard for 'towards the star' and port for away since the earliest days of Turian spacetravel. If it was good enough for the fleet then, it was good enough for Suvir now. 

He shook his head, clearing the momentary distraction and focusing back on his Information Officer's report. They had plenty of time to establish the situation, regardless of the sensor delay. They'd arrived only a minute before, so it'd be an hour and forty minutes before the Quarians spotted them. "They're leaving the lee of that moon, sir, heading one-" 

Suddenly, the report was interrupted and the quiet of the bridge was broken as alarms bleeped anxiously, warning of yet more ships in the system. They'd been there before, of course, but the light-speed-limited sensors had needed time to detect them. "New Contacts, sir, pursuing the Quarians. Same heading, though they are gaining. From their construction, I'd say they're Batarian, sir. Cruiser-class. Not part of any recognised Hegemony fleet or Slaver raiding group - though they're not broadcasting any ID codes anyway."

Suvir took a moment and scanned over his three-D system map, watching as Navigation's vector-projection got the ship VI to calculate probable destinations from the assumptions derived out of the Information Officer's reports. It took only a few moments for the system to come back with a result, and he watched calmly as the system plane began to glow faintly, along with the colour-marked orbits of the half-dozen planetoids and their various satellites as the prediction matrix accounted for various mass, gravitational, and astrographic influences on the possible courses the conflicting ships could take. The scan data from Navigation and Information also added to the image growing rapidly in complexity on the screen. 

A few moments later and the result appeared and the stones dissolved in his gizzard. The Information Officer's reports matched his conclusions. "Spirits. They're headed to the Relay, then?" 

"Relay... three-one-four, yessir." Officer Rejjiktus rattled off another set of readings on the headings and speed of the other occupants of the star system. Spirits again. If they tried to activate the Relay, they could have another Rachni war on their hands. Suvir wasn't an aggressive man, but if peace failed... Council Law was clear. They could not risk another war with a hostile species. 

Suvir paused. "Navigation, set a course for the Relay. I want us to arrive as they do. Tactical, prepare engagement envelopes. We want to disable, not destroy them. And send for a boarding team. We'll find out what we can and call the brass once the shooting is over. Let them sort this out." The two Turian officers, one female and new to Suvir's command, the other an older male that'd been with the ship for years, acknowledged the orders and turned to their stations to obey. "Time to intercept?" 

"About two hours, sir." 

Suvir nodded, then stood. "Excellent. I'm going to go eat something. Once you've followed orders, feel free to get some rest. Alert me when we're ten minutes from them." 

\--

"Ten light-minutes to contact, sir." Suvir blinked as the watch-officer's voice awoke him from the mild daze he'd been sitting in as he chewed absently on a ration bar. 

He straightened up and acknowledged the message. "Thank you. I'll be there shortly." He strode out of his stateroom and headed for the stairs to the bridge. Not for the first time, he thanked the spirits for the Hierarchy's tough physical fitness requirements. The number of stairs on this ship would've been a nightmare otherwise. 

He was barking orders the moment he arrived on the bridge, and each station-officer leapt to report. The Quarians had taken significant damage from the Batarians, but hadn't lost ships or speed. They'd fired back occasionally, but had only damaged the Batarian shields, doing little actual damage to the hull. 

Suvir took a seat in his command chair and leant forward, resting his head on one hand as he studied the readings from the enemy vessels. Relatively decent armour, slightly outdated weaponry, a slightly out-dated mass-effect drive, a below-inadequate sensor array module -

"Identity confirmed on the Batarian vessels, sir." Rejjiktus blurted, interrupting his studies. "They're part of the Balrek Ring." 

Suvir sighed. Slavers, then. Now they had to interfere. "Hail the Batarians and prepare to power weapons." 

A few moments passed and the familiar four-eyed visage of a Batarian appeared on-screen. The Captain, for that was what Suvir presumed he was, glared angrily at him. Probably annoyed we were disturbing his chase, Suvir thought idly. "I am Captain Suvir, of the TSF Aman. And you are?" 

"Captain Id'Shan, of the Independent Merchant Fleet Barzak. What do you want, Turian?" 

Suvir could see his officers bristle at the Batarian's blunt manner. It was one of the things that made dealing with them the most difficult. Nobody but a Batarian could tell whether they were being their usual blunt selves or actually trying to offend. The blatant lie as to their identification only made it more aggravating to a Turian mind. "I merely wish to ask what your conflict with the Quarians is, and if we might be of assistance in moderating it."

"No assistance is needed from the Council, Turian."

Suddenly irritated - or more irritated, in all honesty, and getting steadily more so the longer this conversation went on - Suvir straightened his back and glared at the Batarian Captain. He hoped a blunt demand would calm the situation. "Captain Id'Shan, you are conducting aggressive operations within Hierarchy space. We are well within our rights to destroy you immediately. Stand down, and lets resolve this peaceably." 

The Batarian spat a curse - Batarian swearwords never quite translated correctly, but Suvir knew it was part comment on Turian arrogance, part comment on his dubious ancestry, and entirely angry and outraged at their gall for interfering above their 'station' as non-Batarians - and broke the connection. Moments later, the Batarian fleet swerved into a new formation facing the Turians. Rejjiktus' mandibles clicked as he reported gleefully "They're powering weapons, Captain!" 

Suvir sighed internally at yet another example of Batarian stupidity, then gave the order to open fire. "All ships, weapons free. Shoot to kill." 

His vessel's two mass accelerator guns launched kinetic rounds the instant he finished the command and barely a light-second later the other two ships in his patrol followed suit. He kept one eye on the display and one ear for his subordinate's reports, which came rapidly. 

"Target-One, propulsion down." 

"Target-Three, shields at ten per-cent." 

"Target-One, propulsion failed." 

Combat Doctrines always seemed so neat to Suvir. He passed out orders to his bridge lieutenants, who passed out orders to their sub-lieutenants, who passed out orders to their squad sergeants, who passed out orders to their chiefs and so on down to the lowest of ratings on the ship. The perfect example of the Hierarchy in action, as some said. He took strong pride in his crew's structured efficiency.

The moment the shields on the third Batarian target failed, Suvir issued new orders. "All ships, fire disrupter torpedoes on Target-Three."

"Yessir." The Tactical Officer nodded and tapped a key. The torpedo launchers at the end of each wing of the three cruisers in Suvir's little fleet fired, sending death flying out into the cosmos. As they struck, space-time warped the Batarian vessel, and Suvir grinned in satisfaction as sections of the hull began to writhe and tear themselves apart. 

Information quickly reported. "Target-Three destroyed, Captain." 

"Excellent, continue firing." 

His next order was interrupted by another new-contact alert. On Suvir's display, a largish bubble was slowly expanding to show the movement of the light needed for the sensors to detect new objects within the system. The new contacts had appeared almost directly behind his fleet. "Identify new-"

The Turian vessel suddenly shook under the force of mass accelerator fire. Suvir growled. "Enemies, then." He opened up a channel to his other two ships. "Move to formation Mactal-eight and route more power to the GARDIAN arrays." If he'd been any other race but Turian, he'd be cursing whatever superior made the decision to send him out without a frigate wolfpack or two. While the Abiraka and the Ataris were fine vessels, a Cruiser's sensors weren't efficient things. A frigate wolfpack's powerful sensor arrays would've alerted them to the new targets far sooner. Still. No sense complaining now. 

The other captains acknowledged his order and he heard the beginnings of them both relaying those orders to their subordinates before one began to yell. "Something's wrong, Captain Suvir! The shields are falling too fast!" 

Suvir had no idea how that could be happening. Mactal-eight was designed for a single cruiser trio to hold out against a numerically superior force. They could dodge nearly anything in- Ah. Their Navigation officer was the weak link. He began to order his replacement when the ship captain's image vanished from the screen. He blinked, frozen for a brief moment, but his mind quickly adapted to the necessities of the situation - namely, information from Information. "Information, what happened? Report!"

Rejjiktus looked away from his station and for the briefest of seconds, gave Suvir such a deep look of sadness that he felt his throat begin to ripple in preparation for a mourning song. He swallowed it back as Rejjiktus pulled himself together. "The Abiraka is gone, sir." 

"Damn. Spirits watch over them." And us, Suvir thought. The Mectal-eight only worked with three, and now they were two, just the Aman and the Ataris. 

There was a reason for the strict adherence to Doctrine Guidelines. They worked. Without their third, this would not. His mind rapidly went over options as his watch-officers rattled off more hits and combat actions. He had an idea, and it might work, but to make it happen they had to change positions. "Papnian," He yelled out to the young Navigation officer. "Get us in the cover of the third planet's moons!"

She nodded, tapped a few keys. "Four-light minutes is the fastest I can do, sir." 

Suvir grimaced. "It'll have to do. Avantius, concentrate secondary batteries on target-one. I want their shields down now! Papnian, let me know when we're ready to move. Ataris, concentrate all secondary batteries on target-one and prepare for movement." 

"Yessir." The other Captain's voice was as gruff as ever. 

It took an achingly long time to down the shields on the first Batarian vessel, but it was needed. Id'Shan was the formation commander, so taking him out would buy valuable seconds for the rigid caste structure to produce a replacement. As soon as the flickering kinetic barriers collapsed, Suvir ordered another volley of disrupters. He grinned as their thrusters activated and they sped off toward their target. 

Quickly, the Batarian ship flared and broke apart under the concentrated torpedo fire. The Turians didn't celebrate, only moved on to the next task at hand. "We're ready to move, sir!" 

"Do it!" 

The two Turian ships accelerated forward, leaving the Batarians behind. Suvir felt a grim satisfaction as the two closer vessels stayed silent. They were two light minutes out before the ships reactivated, presumably having chosen their new commander. Rejjiktus almost offhandedly chirped his next report. "The Quarians are out of scanner range, sir." 

Well, at least there was that. They'd saved some suit rats from slavery and enforced Council Law against opening relays. The Abiraka's crew could rest with honor. His ships swooped into orbit of the planetoid, using its gravity to catch a volley of the Batarian missiles meant for them. He could hear someone on the bridge chitter anxiously, and had to crush the urge to snip at them. 

He held his orders. One moment. Two. Three. Five. The full Batarian fleet appeared, moving around the planet and right where he wanted them. "Sir! They split up, there's Batarians behind us, they're-" 

The ship rocked again under missile fire. Suvir cursed as Engineering and Supply began listing damage and rerouting personnel and materials to begin repairs. They were running low on torpedoes, and their limited repair material stock would be nearly entirely depleted by the end of this confrontation. The ship rocked again. "Left wing secondary batteries down. Second mass accelerator down. Estimated repair time is eight minutes." 

Eight minutes? They didn't have eight minutes. Hells, Suvir thought, they barely had eight seconds. "Navigation, evasive action. Dodge what you can, even if it interferes with tactical's shots." 

The first rule of the fleet, so old and so revered it wasn't ever deemed necessary to write into the Doctrines: an enemy would only ever see a Turian's back once they were dead. A Turian never flees. 

Suvir wracked his mind for something else in the Doctrines to help. There wasn't much. Even Tirrek-three, spinning in place and surrounding the ships with a thick layer of mines, designed for combat situations where two ships were massively outnumbered, wouldn't work. The debris from whatever ships were destroyed would move too slowly to be effected by kinetic barriers and would smash his ships to smithereens. The Batarian strategy of local numerical superiority was simple, but astoundingly effective. 

Screw it, he thought. They'd just have to move again. They certainly couldn't stay trapped between two Batarian subformations like this. "Navigation!" He boomed, trying to fill his voice with confidence despite the fact they were essentially retreating for the second time. "Adjust heading down eighty degrees, port forty five degrees. "

The two vessels gracefully eased down and under the moon and Suvir issued another order. "Heading zero ninety mark zero." The two ships immediately separated, one going left and one going right. Suvir watched as the markers for the Batarian fleet flew along their previous track and, at just the right moment, yelled "Heading one-eighty zero mark zero!"

He grinned as the ships rapidly flipped around and began firing at the Batarians. Spirits that looked good. Caught in the crossfire, the Batarian ships began frantically returning fire with whatever weaponry they could. Suvir's attitude grew to elation as two Batarian ships broke under repeated torpedo fire, but then he caught sight of the Ataris breaking apart. The odds had gone from difficult to impossible. 

As the Batarian ships began to focus fire on the Aman, keeping a lock despite his Navigation officer's best efforts at evasive action, Suvir made mental peace with the Spirits and straightened up to order his crew into a last stand gambit. He didn't need to make a speech, didn't need to make any grand gestures. They were Turians. They'd do their duty, and when they fell, they would be remembered. "Inf-"

That was as far as he got before Rejjiktus blurted over the screeching alarms "New contacts, all around us!" as the strangest vessels Suvir had ever seen appeared out of nowhere and began firing on the Batarians. 

His first observation was that the ships were long, unusually so. He'd been attached to a fleet escort for one of the kilometer-long capital ships known as Dreadnoughts that acted as the strongest vessels in the Turian fleet once, and he'd marvelled at their size. These ships, at his eyeball estimate, were around three to four times that length. They were far thinner, though, and looked almost like some of the Asari manarahs he'd seen at an art show once. 

Rejjiktus began reporting again. "Unknown form, unknown transponders, definitely not a Council race. Their hull is composed of unknown alloys, and their weapons are unlike anything we have on record. They're... _possibly_ energy weapons, but we'd need more study to get anything more than that." 

Their weaponry was far stranger than that report implied. Instead of the usual visible emplacements, cannons and barrels and targeting arrays, they had eight long, slightly-raised panels running along the length of the ship at equal intervals around its circumference. Each panel had a series of maybe two-dozen symbols along them that glowed with each bolt of energy. The glow began at the rearmost symbol and moved upward in an apparently-deliberate sequence that varied with the different bolts. 

Suvir wondered how a ship with such slow-firing weaponry could survive any battle - anyone who'd read the Doctrines knew speed and manoeuvrability were the main determiner of survival in a fight. 

Studying closer, there was something... wrong about the symbols. Space around them sort of... waved - or shimmered, maybe - and something in the back of his head began a low hum. Something in it evoked a memory within him, a primitive flicker of one of the giant predators of his homeworld, shaking as the ridged plates across its hide rippled. Or like the first magic show he'd seen back when he was a kid and still believed in that sort of thing, when the magician had pulled back the curtain of reality to reveal the gizka that lay behind. When he looked at that ship, and those symbols, it felt like that something from behind the curtain was trying to get through. His mind recoiled from the very sight, but it took more effort than he was comfortable with to make his eyes do the same, looking away from the screen and toward his crew. "Spirits..." He breathed, his voice hopefully too low to be heard by his subordinates below. 

He could still hear that humming.

Then Rejjiktus began reporting on the Batarians, and somehow things got stranger. "Whatever it is they're firing, it's warping the Batarian's barriers completely. And I honestly have no idea what that is." He said, as a sickly green thing flared out from one of the symbols and essentially absorbed itself into a Batarian vessel. Said vessel almost immediately shut down completely and began to drift dangerously to the side. "Oh. It's an EMP. I think." A couple of windows exploded in a burst of dark purplish fire. "Or not." 

"Navigation, is there a clear route out of here?" Suvir definitely didn't want to be in the firing line of whatever those gun-symbol-weapons were any longer. 

Officer Papnian tapped a few keys, waiting for the reports to come in, then reported "Yessir. We still have enough manoeuvring capability to dodge whatever those weapons are." 

"Good. Get us ten light-minutes out. Engineering, get ready to jump. I want us able to hit FTL at a moment's notice." 

Navigation obeyed with an enthusiastic 'yessir!' as the young officer began cheerily passing the orders down the chain. Engineering quietly acknowledged their order, despite its near-impossibility - engines did require charging and aiming, after all - and began to mutter into his station comm. Suvir nodded to himself. They'd done all they could. All that was left now, was to wait and see what these strange new vessels wanted in return for their help. Oh spirits, and that meant this was _first contact_ here. 

The Batarians concentrated fire on one of the strange, elongated ships and a shield began to pulsate around it like an angry storm, with little flickering bolts of lightning skittering across its surface. The Batarian cruiser spat out a barrage of missiles, presumably trying to slip them through the flickering gaps in the strange ship's shields, but as soon as they got close, that lightning sprang out and collided with each and every one, causing them to explode at a safe distance. That seemed to give the ship enough time to regenerate or repair its shields, as the flickering stopped and the storm vanished. He blinked. They used _lightning_ as point defence? Who the hells were these people?

The Aman began to move, gliding rapidly away from the confrontation. They only had to jolt out of the way of an incoming bolt twice, to Papnian's commendation. Suvir watched in astonishment as another bolt from the strange symbols collided with a Batarian ship and the entire surface of the hull burst into wicked red flames. 

Yet another Batarian ship fell under their fire, leaving only three still standing. As they tried to focus missile-fire on one of the ships again, the tower-vessel rolled and several symbols flared. Suvis stared as the missiles curved around the edge of the tower-vessel's shield-range and flew back into the Batarians. Another two ships went down, and a last sickly-green shot from the mysterious flotilla took out the final one. 

The Turian bridge crew breathed in the ensuing silence. Suvir had no idea what to do next. The Doctrines sure as hell didn't have anything to prepare him for _this._

"Uh, sir?" Rejjiktus offered nervously.

"Yes?" Suvir asked, desperately hoping for a positive report. Let them be friendly, please. Not another Rachni war, Spirits, not another one. 

All Rejjiktus said were three little words, and Suvir wasn't sure if they were worse. 

"They're hailing us." 

\--

**_The Codex:_ **

_'Time Late'-  
_Time Late (or alternatively 'light lag') is a military slang term for the delay in sensor response when moving at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. The closer one moves to true FTL, the more distorted images of anything outside the ship become due to the universal consistency of the speed of light and the nature of spacetime. Computers and VI are the only method any species has come up with to successfully manage this issue. Colloquially, there are three levels of ability to handle light lag. The first, that you are too new to know when to override the automated systems and so act overly reliant on them. The second, and cause of most ship-to-ship collisions, that you believe you know better than the automated systems and bypass them unnecessarily to handle the manoeuvres yourself. The third, that you're experienced enough to know when and where the automated systems need to be bypassed and how to handle the ship when you do so. Very few reach this latter level of competency. 

_Cuner-  
_Cunerus was the closest thing Turians have to a moral revolutionary. While Turians have never had an organised state religion, their spirit worship has been consistent throughout their history until Cunerus became a priest shortly after the initial Turian space-faring projects. The Spirits, so tradition held, were bound in planetary constructs - trees, rocks, water, and so on - but Cunerus believed the spirits arose from the star. After all, it'd given the Turians their thick carapace and their species, like many others, arose from stellar matter. When more secular Turians suggested continuing Naval tradition and using 'starboard' in stellar navigation, Cunerus suggested the alternate 'starward' instead, to mark the importance of the sun as the home of all spirits. The Hierarchy was unwilling to accept his changes and so Cunerus began to proselytise his beliefs and gained a moderate following that persists to this day, thousands of years later. 

_Bridge Crew-  
_While most ships have a primary officer for each department - supply, engineering, navigation, and so on - these are not the only officers responsible for their department. Rather, they act as central hubs for the other watch-officers, virtual intelligences, and ship's complement that provide data and act out orders from throughout the vessel. 

  * The Information Officer acts as 'Officer of the Deck' for the CIC. He provides astronomical data and ship status gathered from various watch-officers and data analysts.
  * The Navigation Officer oversees the helmsmen and provides navigational data.
  * The Tactical Officer oversees military matters on-ship, which mainly covers managing and directing the teams of gunners, and also acts as point-of-contact for any armed-forces attached to the ship. 
  * The Supply & Engineering Officers work closely together. Engineering provides the status of ship's equipment and repairs, while Supply works out what materiel exists and what might be needed. 



_In-System Navigation Conventions-  
_Most every star system in the Galaxy has a single plane within which every large body in the system orbits (the 'ecliptic'). The side of the plane with the most planetary 'northern poles' is termed 'up', while its opposite becomes down. Similarly, directions toward the star become 'starboard' and away become 'port'. This adaption of common seafaring terms is common to most species in an effort to retain some planetbound familiarity as they rise into the unfamiliar vacuum of space. 

Navigation occurs in three-disc directional axes. The first determines 'up' or 'down' along the y-axis (also known as the 'pitch'), another determines 'starboard' or 'port' in the x-axis (also known as the 'yaw'), and the third determines unusual angular motion if needed. Each disc measures 360 degrees, with the ship at the centre, and the term used is determined by which 180 degree hemisphere that the determination lies within. One could be directed 45 degrees up, or 45 degrees down, and navigation officers should keep an attentive ear to ensure they catch the directional term. These axes are always relevant to the system and not the vessel, to allow for consistent orders to be given to multiple-vessel flotillas despite ships being facing different directions. 

There are four main navigational types that utilise these conventions. The first is the bearing, which asks where an object in space is located relative to the observer's sensor array. This is often used to chart the second, the course, which determines a route and/or predicted destination. The third is the heading, which asks in which direction an object is facing, regardless of motion. The final is the track, which establishes the origin point of an object and requires the three other values to determine. 

_The Ecliptic-  
_This is due to events in the formation of a star system, where planets are formed out of a 'disk of dust' surrounding the star. This disk formed due to the origin of star systems in amorphous gas clouds. These clouds spin faster and faster due to the conservation of angular momentum during their collapse increasing even the tiniest of initial spins. They eventually collapse entirely into a disk of dust and gas, which is the maximal balance between gravitational collapse and the centrifugal force created by the rapid spin. As this dust and gas is in a disk, all the planets formed from the dust and gas form in that disk as well. 

_Balrek Ring-  
_The Balreks are one of the many slaver rings and cartels in Batarian Space. Lead by Akran Balrek, they focus mainly on Turian targets. Their home base is currently unknown, but [REDACTED].


End file.
